


destroy everything you touch (you only have to look behind you)

by notcaycepollard



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post 3x07, intimacy issues, just fuck me right up with daisy feelings, mentioned Coulson/Rosalind, not Grant Ward friendly, oh god daisy you beautiful tragic orphan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 02:11:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5229881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notcaycepollard/pseuds/notcaycepollard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is something she knows deeper than logic or reason. What the chain of events feels like is intimacy and betrayal wound together in a knot she can't unpick. What it feels like, is Skye ruining everyone she loves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	destroy everything you touch (you only have to look behind you)

The first time it happens, she's fourteen. 

It's not the first time she's wanted something, bad, and lost it. That happened years before, with the Brodies, and she'd tried, briefly, to close off her heart, to just stop  _wanting_. It hadn't taken.

This is the first time, though, that love has been involved. He's just a kid - a year older than her, but his life has been so _easy_ , she can't help thinking of him as a kid anyway - and one of the neighbors of her latest foster family. But he introduces her to messageboards and hidden networks and the beginnings of writing code, and within two months, she's totally smitten.

She wants him, bad. She loves him, bad, in the first flush of teenage love that makes her palms sweat and her voice shake. She tries to hide it, plays it cool, but the day he puts his hand over hers on the keyboard, turns and clumsily bumps his mouth against her lips, she blushes and stutters and kisses him back like a force.

The next day she's sent back to St Agnes.  _Not a good fit_. She doesn't even have his email address, but she contacts him through the messageboard she knows he hangs out in. He never writes back.

 

+

 

It happens again, different, with her college girlfriend. Marisa's in college, she's not, but it's Marisa who's arrested at the protest against police brutality, even though it's Skye who's holding the banner and arguing back with the cop.

"I think we should stop seeing each other," Marisa tells her after her parents post bail, and Skye doesn't want to ask whether it's Marisa's parents or Marisa who really thinks that. She just pushes Marisa's dark curls back from her face, nods quietly, starts packing her things. She doesn't have much stuff anyway.

She has the cellphone video of the arrest, intended to post it as proof of racist policing, but Marisa asks her not to. She doesn't. Instead of deleting it, though, she watches it occasionally. Not the arrest, just the moments beforehand, the seconds where Marisa turns to her, smiles wide and free and beautiful, and the camera pans down to their hands interlinked. She watches it like pressing a bruise, and every time, she thinks, _bad influence_.

 

+

 

When it happens with Miles, Skye starts to put together the pattern. 

It feels  _good_ , to have his skin against hers, his hands and his mouth and his body, the way he's so familiar. It feels like connection, like longing, and she knows all the reasons why she and Miles can't keep their relationship going while she's inside SHIELD, but oh, she's missed him these years. She's missed love.

The kick of it, when Coulson and Ward lay out the proof that Miles sold someone out, it hurts so much, and the way they look at her is worse. She realizes, sudden and clear, that she wants SHIELD, bad.

She knows, logically, that Miles sold the information before she ever reconnected with him, and that he would have done it regardless. But what the chain of events feels like is intimacy and betrayal wound together in a knot she can't unpick. What it feels like, is Skye ruining everyone she loves.

All she can do is try harder not to want. All she can do is try harder not to open her heart. She knows it won't be enough.

 

+

 

Ward makes it a pattern she can't ignore.

It makes her sick to her stomach. She'd let her guard down, opened up her cracks to let him in. Ward is a broken bird, someone she could help heal with care and love and maybe even talking about their feelings.

Ward is none of those things. Ward is a killer.

She'd kissed him in the Hub and then he'd shot Victoria Hand. He'd kissed her at Providence with Koenig's blood still wet on him.

 _It's me_ , she thinks,  _this is me_ , and she tries so hard to stop.

 

+

 

Trip's too difficult, Trip's so hard, because he's  _Trip_ , he's funny and kind and incredibly, radiantly attractive, and it's just too easy to love him. She doesn't even realize she's doing it.

"Come on girl, you know I look good," he teases, and oh, he does, he looks so good, Skye feels her palms sweat the way she hasn't since she was a nervous teenager.

Her father tries to kill him, and she should know right then. He follows her into the temple like it's the obvious thing to do, like he's going to save her, and when he turns to stone and breaks into pieces, Skye knows she's nothing but a wrecking ball.

 _It's my fault_ , she knows, and she can't even run, but oh, she can destroy the world with a quake every time she cries.

 

+

 

Coulson is dangerous, so dangerous, the way he looks at her. His eyes shine, his face turns gentle and amazed and awe-struck, and Skye knows he doesn't even know.

 _No_ , she thinks, _no, I won't let you,_ _I_ can't  _let you_ , because he's the best thing she's got, and SHIELD needs him. SHIELD needs him so much more than she needs his love.

He hugs her anyway, in the Retreat, and her heart beats so fast when his arms wrap around her. She wants, she wants  _bad_ , and she can't. Trip was bad enough. She can't let that happen to Coulson too.

Her family feels like a love she could accept, a love that's not destructive, but her family happens to Coulson instead, and it's worse than she could have imagined.

She can't even look at his hand for the first month.   _I did this_ , she thinks every time, and it feels so unfair, because she tried so hard not to.

 

+

 

She doesn't mean for any of it to go wrong with Lincoln. She's just desperate, desperate for him to come in, desperate to protect him, and when he fights it, she uses what advantages she has. Daisy's seen how he looked at her, picked up on the flirtation he was laying down. She'd ignored it, before now, because he doesn't deserve the aftermath of it. His life at the hospital's already destroyed, though, he's on the run. It feels like he's caught up in her damage regardless.

"Please," she says, leans into the kiss, and it changes his mind.

It's not what brings in the ATCU, she  _knows_ it's not, but this isn't a logical pattern, this is something she knows goes deeper than logic or reason. Daisy kisses Lincoln, and Coulson sells him to the ATCU for  _her_ , to protect her. She didn't even love Lincoln, she thinks furiously, but she could have. Perhaps it was enough that he began to love her, in the brief second of that kiss.

 

+

 

Coulson and Rosalind is something that hurts, a roiling twist that won't go away, but Daisy tries so hard to be glad about it. At least with Rosalind, he'll be safe from Daisy's pattern of destruction.

He's not. He's not safe at all. She should have put the pieces together. She should have seen the way he still looked at her. Everything he was doing was to protect Daisy, and all she can think is,  _you should never have loved me_.

She finds him, because she can't not, and he's okay, he's alive, he's in one piece (just). Daisy doesn't kill Rosalind (just). She does kill Ward, and Malick, and Banks, brings the building down in a pile of smoking rubble, and pushes herself so hard to do it that at the end of it all, when Coulson is safe, she stands in the epicenter and falls, slowly, to the floor.

When she wakes, she can't place herself for a moment. The medbay, she thinks, looking around, and Coulson is asleep in a chair next to her, his hand reached out as if to touch hers. Her arms ache. Everything aches. She can't look down, and then she does, and she's bruised the way she was when she couldn't control herself.

Coulson's prosthetic is missing, and his face has a dark and terrible bruise on one cheekbone, and Daisy puts the pieces together. _Ward's fist. Coulson's face_.

"Hey," he says softly, waking and seeing she's awake. "You had me worried for a minute there."

"I'm so sorry," she chokes out. "Coulson, I'm so  _sorry_."

"What-" Coulson replies, looking confused.

"It's all on me," she says, "it's all my fault. This, your hand, everything that happens, it's all my fault."

"Daisy, what are you talking about?" he says, bewildered, pulls his chair closer, and she lets out a sob.

"I tried to stop," she whispers. "I tried to stop loving you. I just. I couldn't."

"You- what- what does that have to do with any of this?"

She's sobbing harder now, gasping for breath, and Coulson looks so worried, so much like he wants to touch her, that she grabs his hand, holds it tight. Her fingers flare with pain, but it doesn't matter, because she can't help it, she can't stop loving Phil Coulson, and what more can go wrong. ( _Trip_ , her mind whispers, but she thought Coulson was dead already, she thought Coulson was gone, and all she'd felt was regret that she'd lost so much time by trying to stop the inevitable.) _  
_

"I'm a pattern," she tries to say, "I'm a pattern. Miles. Ward. Lincoln. Wherever I go. I didn't want you to love me, Phil, you shouldn't-"

" _Oh_ ," Coulson breathes, "god, Daisy,  _no_ , you're not. You're not." He leans in closer, brushes his lips over her forehead, and she hiccups, sucks in a deep breath, hiccups again. "I'd never let you destroy me," he tells her, firm, and Daisy's afraid but she believes it. She wants to believe it.

"It hurts so much," she admits, "Phil, everything falling down around me, it hurts so much."

"I know," Coulson murmurs, "god, Daisy, I know," and he traces his lips down her temple, along her cheekbone, her nose, kisses her lips whisper-light. She's still crying, tears falling that she can't stop, and everything hurts, but when he brings his hand to her face, kisses her again, it feels like she can believe him. "No matter what happens," he tells her. "Even if everything falls down. We'll always rebuild."

"Okay," she whispers, "okay," and he kisses her again, gentle as a promise, and oh, she wants this,  _bad._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry I have so many feelings
> 
> (title credit from the song by Ladytron)


End file.
